Top 10: Unknown Serial Killers

Some of the best nicknames are wasted on serial killers. A wrestler known as The Sydney Mutilator would inspire fear and fanaticism, and if women knew you as The Florida Sex Beast wherever you went, your reputation would precede you like satin sheets on a waterbed.

Unfortunately, these nicknames describe truly horrible human beings. Often, nicknames aren’t necessary when the crimes are so gruesome and the killer’s given name becomes synonymous with ultimate horror. Dahmer and Bundy come to mind, but few know that serial killers have been a scourge on humanity for centuries and their numbers are in the hundreds.

And so, here are the Top 10 Unknown Serial Killers. This is not a chronicle of praise or endorsement. At the very least, it is a grisly read through the human bizarre and at most a cautionary tale refuting the cheery notion that we’re all decent people at heart. In fact, it seems some of us are inhuman abominations.

If a killer has made this list, he (or she) satisfied the following criteria.

As of 2007 he is good and dead.

He faced some form of earthly justice, whether through arrest, conviction, execution or mob rule.

His acts of violence were so totally incompatible with civilized human society that he was entirely unfit for life within it.

Number 10

Gilles de Rais

The Sadistic Aristocrat

Despite a staggering 80 to 600 body count, the man regarded by many as the prototype of today’s serial killer barely cracks the top ten. This is because historical records are unreliable and Gilles de Rais’ murderous statistics cannot be proven.

De Rais was a wealthy and powerful 15th century French nobleman who once fought side by side with Joan of Arc. De Rais had a sick obsession with young boys and preferred victims who resembled himself as a child. The Sadistic Aristocrat, as he came to be known, lured blond-haired, blue-eyed peasant boys to his stately home where he and a few assumed accomplices raped, tortured and mutilated them. In 1440 the ecclesiastical court in Nantes hanged the monster before torching his body — just to be on the safe side

Seriously psychotic: De Rais would sit on the stomach of his dying victim and pleasure himself.

Number 9

Carl Panzram

Rage Personified

Many serial killers often rely on charm to seduce their victims into their clutches, but very few had Panzram’s qualities: a sense of humor and a sense — albeit sparse — of some regret.

Panzram’s commitment to mayhem was as disturbing as it was frank and unapologetic. After being sentenced to death for killing a man in prison, he threatened to kill anyone who tried to have his verdict overturned. In his autobiography, Panzram: A Journal of Murder, he employed a matter-of-fact tone in confessing to 21 murders and the rape of 1,000 boys, adding, “for all these things I am not the least bit sorry.” However, Panzram did express regret for one thing: being born. Since childhood, he considered himself so incessantly angry that he called himself Rage Personified.

Seriously psychotic: After raping and killing a boy Panzram claimed, "His brains were coming out of his ears when I left him. I am not sorry. My conscience doesn’t bother me. I sleep sound and have sweet dreams.”